Ruud Hendriks, assistant professor at Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University, will give a talk on «Clothing the clown. Creative dressing in day-centre for people with dementia”
I will present my ethnographic fieldwork on a creative project of the Dutch healthcare-clowning foundation VisiteClowns. Fieldwork on the project took place in a day-activity centre for people living with dementia in the Netherlands. Presenting selected field notes, I will reflect on the conceptual frame that helps transform our understanding of dementia. Moving beyond stories of dementia as individual human loss this project helps to see playful imagination, embodied skill and creative possibility.
Ruud Hendriks, Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Ruud has worked as a care worker in mental health care, before his studies in Health sciences and training in Science and Technology Studies. His academic work focuses on art- and technology-based interventions in mental health care. He has widely published on clowning in dementia care and on autistic spectrum disorders. For his ethnographic work on elder-clowning, he was trained as a ‘miMakkus’ clown himself. Ruudwas project-leader and co-researcher in the project ‘Beyond autonomy and language’ that aimed to develop a disability studies’ perspective on dementia. His current interest is in the moral role things play in dementia care (project: ‘Make-Believe Matters’, that reflects on the ethics of technologies of make-believe in person-centred dementia care).
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion with three researchers from the Artful Dementia Research Lab:
Please contact Lilli Mittner if you have any questions.